Will they admit how much time the humans actually do the controlling.
If you keep doing the work for them, they’ll never learn. They need to figure it out for themselves.
Automation has always been about de-skilling to cheaper, more abuse-able labour, and not about actually eliminating work. This goes all the way back to the broad looms and the luddites. There were still loom workers in the new factories - its just that they were children who could be worked to death for pennies.
Well, automation under our current system, yes.
Artificial artificial intelligence
I still have no idea how these are legally able to operate on public roads. Shit seems wild to me. Wouldn’t last 5 seconds here in Chicago, for numerous reasons lol
Well bribery and corruption are illegal only in theory and only if you don’t call it “lobbying.” Google has a lot of money so it really doesn’t matter (to the people making the rules) if these things should be on the road or not.
Why won’t waymo work in Chicago specifically?
“Hey clanker, you drove in the wrong city…!”
Same for the delivery bots. They’re all getting some remote control help.
It’s all mechanical Turks
This would have actually been a great thing to not only acknowledge but promote if they weren’t so caught up in their own hype.
Not that I will ever get into one of those death traps but if you tell the average consumer that any failures in autonomy immediately engage a tele-operator “to keep you moving on your way” they would probably feel better about riding.
I’ve done tele-driving before and it’s remarkably good, even if latency is a concern.
It’s the facade of it all, the need to seem to live up to the hype. It’s going to get more people killed.
any failures in autonomy immediately engage a tele-operator
One of the problems is that these “failures in autonomy” could include a failure to engage a tele-operator when one is needed.
They just stop moving when that happens. It’s been the cause of many traffic jams.
I work near downtown Austin, where both Waymo and Robotaxi operate.
Waymo cars are some of the best drivers on the road because they actuallyt ested their product, use multiple Lidar sensors instead of just cameras, and have remote driver backups for unusual situations.
Teslas drive like maniacs and will end a ride and tell the driver to get out in the middle of a lane.
I’ve ridden in a few Waymo’s before, in SF they can be more dependable or easier to get than other ride options. I never felt like I was ever in danger in one.
Within my handful of experiences with them I’ve never had to use the help button or features to request assistance from a tele-operator but it was clear that they weren’t trying to hide the function from the passengers as the feature was explained and clearly labeled.
A friend who uses them often told me of the one time he needed to ask for assistance when their Waymo was stuck behind a doordash scooter with its hazard lights on that was either delivering or picking up and blocking a turn lane in downtown SF. The Waymo didn’t know what to do to get around it, my friend hit the button for assistance, a voice came over the speakers asking how they could help, my friend explained the situation and the tele-operator drove the car to safely navigate the situation. He said it was probably 1.5-2mins of tota inconvenience with 75% of that time was him wondering if he should hit the help button or not.
I understand a lot of AI implementation, such as Amazon Fresh or other business models have been hiding offshored human assistance within their “AI” features, which I do agree with you is deceitful but my experience with Waymo was not that. They did not hide or obfuscate that function and feature of the service but actively informed the passenger of its existence.
Granted, I haven’t ridden in one for almost a year at this point and I only did so in the SF market so things may have changed since or are different elsewhere.
Also, I can’t say that I follow the news intently about Waymo, I know they have run over a couple cats but I hadn’t heard anything about them killing people. Has that happened?
this tech is doing great to devalue workers. drivers, this time.
AI = Actual International-workers
AI =Actually Indians
I’m also AI
Actually Introverted
AI = Asians Inside
Someone needs to slap an Asians Inside sticker in the same style as the Intel ones on the Waymos.
deleted by creator
And these foreign crowd workers know the local traffic rules? Maybe they even have regular drivers licenses?
This used to be my job. They’re not controlling the cars. They’re basically completing real-time CAPTCHAs, telling the car whether the cameras see a stop sign, a bicycle, temporary barriers, etc. If the car can’t identify an object that could possibly cross its path, it pulls over and stops until an operator can do a sanity-check on whatever the car’s confused by. They only need to be able to identify objects on the road, not know the rules of the road.
I think the interventions here are more like: “that’s a trash can someone pushed onto the road - let me help you around it” rather than: “let me drive you all the way to your destination.”
It’s usually not the genuinely hard stuff that stumps AI drivers - it’s the really stupid, obvious things it simply never encountered in its training data before.
Saw this blog post recently about waymo’s sim setup for generating synthetic data and they really do seem to be generating pretty much everything in existence. The level of generalization of the model they seem to be using is either shockingly low or they abort immediately at the earliest sign of high perplexity.
I’m guessing it’s the latter, they need to keep accidents to a minimum if they’re ever going to get broad legislation to legalise them.
Every single accident is analysed to death by the media and onlookers alike, with a large group of people wanting it to fail.
This is a prime example, we’ve known about the human intervention for a while now but period people seem surprised that those people are in another country.
Feels like the robot hoovers when they encounter an unexpected poo.
it’s the really stupid, obvious things
Hm. Interesting. But that makes them look even mode incapable than I feared.
Broadly speaking, an AI driver getting stumped means it’s stuck in the middle of the road - while a human driver getting stumped means plowing into a semi truck.
I’d rather be inconvenienced than killed. And from what I’ve seen, even our current AI drivers are already statistically safer than the average human driver - and they’re only going to keep getting better.
They’ll never be flawless though. Nothing is.
Ai drivers have run over and crushed people slowly before too though because they didn’t see the person as an “obstacle” to be avoided, or because they were on the ground, it didn’t see them
And they always will. You need to look at the big picture here, not individual cases. If we replaced every single car on US roads with one driven by AI - proven to be 10 times better a driver than a human - that would still mean 4,000 people getting killed by them each year. That, however, doesn’t mean we should go back to human drivers and 40,000 people killed annually.
Big picture is AI not being able to operate under unusual conditions means that the “10 times better” (if it were only true) has a big fucking caveat where we can’t say the stat will hold true if we replace all drivers.
You need to look at the big picture here, not individual cases.
We should really be investing in trains and buses, not cars of any type.
I think your logic is flawed. The discussion is about a specific form of transportation. By your own logic, you should be suggesting that people fly everywhere.
I fully agree with you, but there is the issue of robotaxis crashing 3x as often as human drivers - and thats with a human supervisor on board. So if we switched completely to AI cars with the current level of integration, thats 120000 people killed.
Tesla made the idiotic decision to rely entirely on cameras, waymo used lidar and other sensors to augment vision.
That’s Tesla, not Waymo. Tesla’s hardware is shit and does not even include lidar. You can’t judge the entire industry by the worst example.
current AI drivers are already statistically safer than
As long as they use level 3 autonomous cars and then cheat with remote operators instead of using real level 5 cars, such statistics remain quite meaningless.
However, they tell about the people who use them as arguments.
As the OP stated, the low velocity cases are not causing deadly accidents. And you can’t drive by wire at high speed (too much latency). So I doubt it’s affecting the stats in any meaningful way.
Honestly I much prefer they have a human as a backup than not.
As the OP stated, the low velocity cases are not causing deadly accidents.
Make humans drive as slow as these cars and deaths will drop too.
The cars aren’t driving that slow the vast majority of the time…
Here’s a short video of someone receiving help. They explain briefly that they provide instructions to the vehicle, they don’t do the actual driving
This is how it generally behaves, but they are capable of taking direct control in more difficult situations. It’s only very slow maneurvers though, it’s not like they would be driving it down the street. They could move it off the road onto the shoulder though if needed.
Edit: I am trying to find the source, but having problems. It was only ever mentioned in 1 official waymo document that I’ve seen that it was technically possible. My guess is they say their remote helpers can’t / don’t do it because they truly can’t, and it’s some highly restricted type of person who can, who isn’t classified like these other employees. The whole misleading but technical true kinda speak. I’ll keep looking though because I was really surprised to see them admit it when I saw it in an official document.
Found it
In very limited circumstances such as to facilitate movement of the AV out of a freeway lane onto an adjacent shoulder, if possible, our Event Response agents are able to remotely move the Waymo AV under strict parameters, including at a very low speed over a very short distance.
Looks like I was right as well on terminology, it’s not the remote operators that can do it, it’s the “Event Response” team that can.
As far as I know this is the only official acknowledgement it’s possible. Everywhere else they say it isn’t, and this is a footnote in that document.
That is like the person steering to avoid a collision while cruise control and lane assist are on, it isn’t actually fully autonomous.
Can you imagine the lawsuits?
No. I am not from there. Feel free to explain what is possible.
In my country we have a law that requires such remote operators to have a license that is valid here.
(Sadly, we do not require them to reside here)
So if a business has AI drive a car, but then AI hands it over to a human who has no drivers license in the location, they are essentially allowing someone to operate a vehicle without a license, who is not even inside the country. If that car crashes into someone, Waymo has to explain why they let someone wildly unqualified and unlicensed operate for them. That’s millions in damages for gross neglect.
This is way better than Robo Taxi convoys of 2 chase cars following one driverless vehicle. A fraction of the footprint and manpower cost of Musk’s venture.
Anyone else not very impressed?
the same thing happened with that Amazon shop that you could apparently take anything out without checking out and it would automatically charge your account…
turns out they had workers watching the camera footage
AI stands for Actually
IndiansFilipinosLet’s get rid of undocumented workers they said
Each worker has a readme now, it’s alright /s
Don’t forget 200 pages of EULA
being “undocumented” or “illegal” is a local bedtime story. It doesn’t apply to people everywhere
